“I Am A Man: Memphis Sanitation Strike 1968,” Exhibit at the National Civil Rights Museum. Photo: Alex Richardson
I think and write about problems in moral and political philosophy.
More specifically, I'm interested in the liberal ideal of civility and the role it plays in circumstances of oppression and other sorts of injustice. I’m currently thinking about the importance of the ideal of civility in educational contexts, particularly as it informs the project of civic education. My doctoral dissertation (2021) focused on the ideal of civility as it applies to the politics of resisting oppression. I also like to think and write about environmental and intergenerational justice, feminist philosophy, racial justice, and the philosophy of education.
Recent Projects
Photo: Getty Images
DOCTORAL Dissertation (2021)
Oppression, Civility, and the Politics of Resistance
Committee: Jon Garthoff (Chair), David Reidy, Lisi Schoenbach, Georgi Gardiner
My dissertation critically engages with the project of resisting political oppression, inquiring after its forms and justification. In Chapter 1, I define and clarify the nature of oppression, with a particular focus on racial oppression at the site of criminal justice and policing in the United States. Chapters 2 and 3 criticize two common frameworks for understanding political resistance: civil disobedience and political violence. Given the shortcomings of these frameworks, I advance a novel if intuitive framework for understanding and evaluating resistance in Chapter 4. There, I argue that our understanding benefits from (A) a commitment to political constructiveness, which I think captures what is valuable about the liberal virtue of civility, and (B) a commitment to transformational societal change, which I think captures a central thread in more total or violent responses to oppression. To conclude, I recommend two initiatives to approach the problem of oppression from both ends, as it were: (A) what I call constructive political resistance, drawing on the framework I develop in Chapter 4, and (B) deliberative civic education programs which emphasize the modeling and practice of substantive equality and liberal reciprocity.
Photo: Alex Richardson
Article (2018)
Toward a Capability-Based Account of Intergenerational Justice
Ethic@: An International Journal for Moral Philosophy 17 (3): 363-388, 2018
In this paper, I draw on the capabilities approach to social justice and human development as advanced, among others, by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and seek to provide some theoretical resources for better understanding our obligations to future persons. It is my hope that the capabilities approach, properly applied, can give us a novel way of understanding our responsibilities toward future generations in a time where such an understanding is both unfortunately lacking and increasingly needed.